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Partus (birth) is a collaboration between visual artist Ruth Jones and electronic composer Andy Wheddon that takes as a starting point a CTG scan of a medicalised labour and birth. The 10ft long paper trace contains ultrasound recordings of a number of bodily rhythms that faithfully record the labour, such as the mother’s contractions and blood pressure and the baby’s heart rate. Partus reinterprets and enacts the trace as sound, mediating between mourning the medical-technological intervention in labour and reclaiming the human experience.

A fifteen minute documentary film about the making of Partus is now available for viewing.

Plans are afoot to bring Stephen Jenkinson back to west Wales between 17th and 21st May 2017. Further details to follow. If you would like to join a mailing list to receive information about this as it becomes available, please email Ruth Jones holyhiatuswales@gmail.com

Partus (birth) is a collaboration between visual artist Ruth Jones and electronic composer Andy Wheddon that takes as a starting point a CTG scan of a medicalised labour and birth. The 10ft long paper trace contains ultrasound recordings of a number of bodily rhythms that faithfully record the labour, such as the mother’s contractions and blood pressure and the baby’s heart rate. Partus reinterprets and enacts the trace as sound, mediating between mourning the medical-technological intervention in labour and reclaiming the human experience. Partus will echo the altered experience of time that being in labour induces, linking the project to Jones’ on going exploration of liminal or threshold states. The performance will combine electronic samples and the live voices of improvisational singers Maggie Nicols and Emily Laurens, to take the audience on an immersive journey through the rhythmic primal beats of one of life’s great transitions – birth.

Following the overwhelming response to his previous visit in 2014, Stephen Jenkinson, founder of the Orphan Wisdom School is returning to the UK in 2015 for a number of events, including four dates with Holy Hiatus in Wales. Tickets are now available for purchase online.

Friday 6th November – An Introduction to Dying Wise – evening talk based on Stephen’s recently published book Die Wise at Bridges Community Centre, Monmouth

Go to Events to book tickets for 6th / 7th and 14th November or to Theatr Gwaun for talk on 13th November

Some comments from attendees from Stephen’s previous Holy Hiatus events:

“I was profoundly affected by the weekend, so much so that I brought my partner in halfway through Saturday. It’s hard to put into words how it left me, devastated maybe? Heart-broken but hooked. I can assure you any chance I can get to hear Stephen speak I will take like a shot”.

“A Stephen Jenkinson event is not a refuge for those seeking anodyne spiritual consolations and neatly worked systems. He expects that you pay him the respect of listening attentively to his message, and if you’re wise you will. What he has to tell us, is of the profoundest significance. He speaks hard-earned truths of the Soul that have been won through far reaching reflection, deep immersion in authentic living and long, long apprenticeship. They are inescapable, yet unwelcome in a world distracted by the techno-fantasies of limitlessness and psychically numbed by collective death denials, on an epic scale.

But fear not, the tone is of a heartfelt seriousness, not one of gloom. The style of the telling is nothing short of astonishing, masterful, riveting, and genuinely, genuinely Bardic and with an effect that I thirst to repeat…

I came away Joyful, resolved to live and to die well.”

“Stephen’s teachings devastated me and I didn’t know initially how to translate the new paradigm to my existing situation. It changed radically the way I work with clients as a counsellor. The event has given me a language by which to communicate what I have been feeling and sensing about our culture”

“I particularly value the way we were able to not be in our heads; I have experienced a good deal of meditation and teachings, retreats etc…Stephen seemed to be reaching directly into our hearts. Yes, some of that is painful – “harrowing”, I have a sense of everything being pregnant with death, it grows within us all, everything…I have a stronger sense that life and death are not separate”.

Friday 16th October, Theatr Gwaun, Fishguard 7 pm Screening of Seven Songs for a Long Life (formerly with the working title Singing Hospice) followed by Q & A with director Amy Hardie.

Seven Songs documents the lives of six day-care patients in Strathcarron Hospice, following them between home and hospice as they navigate their way through the end of a future that faces all of us….(read more)

As part of the project The Quick & the Dead, Holy Hiatus presents two workshop weekends in Wales with Stephen Jenkinson, teacher, author, storyteller, spiritual activist, farmer, ceremonialist and founder of the Orphan Wisdom School, Ottawa, Canada, a teaching house for the skills of deep living, good dying and crafting human culture.

“From a young age we see around us that grief is mostly an affliction, a misery that intrudes into the life we deserve, a rupture of the natural order of things. Here’s the revolution: What if grief is a skill, in the same way that love is a skill, something that must be learned and cultivated and taught? What if grief is the natural order of things, a way of loving life anyway? Grief and the love of life belong together. They are natural human skills that can be learned first by being on the receiving end and feeling worthy of them, later by practicing them when you run short of understanding. In a time like ours, grieving is a subversive act”.(Stephen Jenkinson)

The Meaning of Death – Tredegar House, Newport, Gwent

Saturday 21st – Sunday 22nd November 2014

Death – the Cradle of your love of Life – Small World Theatre, Cardigan

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The Quick and the Dead

The Quick and the Dead is a new Holy Hiatus project exploring birth rites and death rites. These rites of passage affect everyone, and are arguably the most significant experiences we encounter. This project will explore our own birth experiences, the birthing of our children and the broader “birthing” of creative projects/ideas. Equally, our experiences of loss of loved ones, reflections on our own mortality, and experiences of loss in general, such as places we love or passing traditions will be addressed. The Quick and the Dead has received a Research and Development Grant from The Arts Council of Wales. A second phase for 2014-2015 is planned to include artists’ residencies that will engage directly with communities, workshops, film screenings and a publication.

This six-hour performative event explores how liminal space is created, experienced and shared, using repetitions of a phrase of movement and a 13th century song. Each event includes live vocal performance and playback of the previous year’s recording; this process amplifies the acoustic response of the space which slowly overwhelms the earlier recordings to form an extraordinary evolving soundscape.

Maura Hazelden was commissioned by Ruth Jones in 2008 to create a work for Holy Hiatus: a series of artworks and a symposium. In collaboration with Lou Laurens she created untitled: holy hiatus in the newly completed Small World Theatre. untitled: holy hiatus is an annual ritual: this will the seventh event.

The artists are dedicating this year’s event to the memory of John Sharkey in gratitude for his friendship, and his particular contribution to untitled: holy hiatus.